In Memoriam for

DAVID HENRY DUMAS (1958-1987)

Who Was Stamina.

Who Was Sweet steel.

A Song Rendered Unto Us. His Father's Witness.

MICHAEL HASSAN DUMAS (1962-1994)

Whose accent was Born on the wings Of a country His father loved

MARGARET WALKER ALEXANDER

( i 9 i 5 i 998 )

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000)

RAYMOND R. PATTERSON (1929-2001)

Pioneer-Navigators of the “Soular System , ”

Advisory £sf Contributing Editors to Drumvoices Revue,

Trustees of the EBR Writers Club ,

Contributors to a Special Henry Dumas (Double) Issue of Black American Literature Forum (Summer—Fall 1988)

Shapers-Bearers of the Legacies Heralded & Extended by HD

THE COFFEE HOUSE PRESS BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT SERIES EDITORIAL PANEL

Sandra Adell

Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies,

University of Wisconsin at Madison

Alexs D. Pate

Author, and Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies, University of Minnesota

John S. Wright

Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies, and English, University of Minnesota

THE COFFEE HOUSE PRESS BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT SERIES

The postwar 1920s was the decade of the “New Negro” and the Jazz Age “Harlem Renaissance," or first Black Renaissance of literary, visual, and performing arts. In the 1960s and 70s Vietnam War era, counterpointing the white backlash against the civil rights movement and rising Black Power insurgencies of SNCC, CORE, and the Black Panthers, a self-proclaimed "New Breed” generation of black artists and intellectuals orchestrated what they called the Black Arts Movement.

This energetic and highly self-conscious Black Arts Movement accompanied and helped foster an explosion of urban black popular culture analogous in many ways to the cultural renaissance of the earlier era: Broadway shows and off-Broadway independent black theater; African inspired painting and sculpture and postmodern graphics; music-minded performance poetry and streetcorner “rapping”; avant-garde “free jazz” with consciously cultivated Afro-Asian references and mystical spirituality; independent and Hollywood-based black cinema riveted on street life and the politics of the urban ghettos; politico-religious sects and charismatic orators like Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael; “soul music” performers such as Ray Charles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin—and a host of writers—who celebrated and critiqued it all from the vantage point of a newly articulated Third World conscious "Black Aesthetic."

Although most of the literary commentary on the movement emphasizes Black Arts poetry and drama, African American novelists too walked the walk. The transformations of black consciousness produced corollary changes in the forms, styles, techniques, and ethos of all the African American literary modes. The Coffee House Press Black Arts Movement Series is devoted to reprinting unavailable works of the period. In selecting the titles, the editorial panel of African American authors and scholars has employed no fixed guidelines. We have looked for works with distinctive voices, with historical value as windows on the literary and social world of the time, and with that subjective and impressionistic quality of “aliveness" that crosses boundaries of audience, era, and topicality. We have tried to choose work that is masterful, that deserves another chance and other audiences, and that will help us keep the windows to the future open.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2016 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/echotreecollecteOOduma